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Filed under Architecture on August 18, 2008 by Avi Flax

RESTful Hullabaloo

I've always wanted to use the word "hullabaloo" in a published piece of writing, and now I can finally cross that off my list of life goals.

There's been a lot of hullabaloo about REST in the web-tech-o-sphere lately, and rather than sum it all up here, and then add my 2¢, I just want to point out that Tim Bray has already done so, with his usual insight: REST Questions.

When all is said and done, I agree with the moderate view that REST is a very useful architectural pattern, but nobody wins when it's turned into a religion. There are pros and cons of following REST for a given situation, and they should be considered. No architectural approach is a good fit for all situations.

That said, I have found REST to be an excellent pattern for building web services, and I think it's simpler — in a good way — than any RPC style (such as SOAP, XML-RPC, or anything homegrown) — after you factor in many factors such as documentation, caching, scalability, and many more.

I also think following REST is generally better than building "plain old XML" or "plain old JSON", or "plain old anything" web services, because following any architectural style is generally better than following none. But even that's not always true — there's sometimes value in building something quick and dirty that just gets a job done, quickly.

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